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Sperm May Carry Dad's Stress to Offspring

by Carolyn Buchanan on June 18, 2013

Carolyn Buchanan

About the Author

B.C. (before children), Carolyn was trained as a journalist — a generalist journalist. Now as a parent, she experiences news differently. What was once an item of passing interest, i.e. "Toy Train Runs on Lead Paint" or "Midnight Release Planned for Latest Power Rangers Movie" now consumes her life. Still she trains her eye to find the family relevance in everything new, and that's what she endeavors to share with you here. As a parent, and a writer for What to Expect, she will be your family-news filter (with a personal twist).

About the Blog

WhatToExpect.com supports Word of Mom as a place to share stories and highlight the many perspectives and experiences of pregnancy and parenting. However, the opinions expressed in this section are those of individual writers and do not reflect the views of Heidi Murkoff of the What to Expect brand.

Summary: Dad's exposure to stress may affect the way offspring respond to stressful scenarios, a new study found. Of course, there isn't much you can do about a stressful past, but you can head off present and future stress by being aware, recognizing the symptoms, and applying some stress-reducing strategies to help you, and your mate to better cope.

According to a new study, a man's sperm passes on a lot more than good looks, intelligence, and athletic ability — it also carries stress. From as far back as pre-adolescence through adulthood, if a male has experienced chronic tension, his offspring may be predisposed to a poor response to adversity, which can lead to related disorders including anxiety and depression.

In order to examine the effects of paternal tension, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, exposed male mice to six weeks of chronic strain, before breeding, either throughout puberty or only in adulthood. The stressful scenarios included sudden moves to another cage, predator odor (fox urine is an example), noise, or a foreign object in the cage.

Male mice were thought to be ideal subjects for such an experiment because they are essentially absent dads, and don't participate in "offspring rearing," which makes any external factors outside of "germ-cell formation" essentially irrelevant.

The team found that offspring from paternal strain groups showed significantly lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone (the human equivalent is cortisol) in response to tension. In other words, the offspring of stressed male mice had a reduced response to stress.

"It didn't matter if dads were going through puberty or in adulthood when stressed before they mated. We've shown here for the first time that stress can produce long-term changes to sperm that reprogram the offspring HPA stress axis regulation," said Tracy L. Bale, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. "These findings suggest one way in which paternal-stress exposure may be linked to neuropsychiatric diseases."

Were you aware of the power of stress? Do you have tension-reducing strategies to share?